The music of Vashti Bunyan sounds like it comes from another time – located partly in history and partly in the realm of dreams. Sung in a gossamer voice as light as air, her songs evoke fields, villages, and dusty roads in the tradition of pastoral poetry and ancient Broadside ballads. Originally part of the British folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bunyan has sustained the same ethereal qualities in her more recent work. Yet there is gravity in her music that subtly reflects the hassles of everyday life, the stress of change, and a wish to escape down “a road without end”.
Lookaftering, the album Bunyan recorded in 2005 after a 35-year absence from music, refined the gestures laid down on her previous album, 1970’s Just Another Diamond Day. The new expanded edition of Lookaftering doubles the length of the original album, repeating each of its songs in live, alternate, or demo versions left unreleased until now. Bunyan has long been ambivalent about labeling herself a “folk” artist – she sees herself more on the fringes of pop – yet her music’s rural, timeless ambiance has more to do with folk than with rock or mainstream pop.
Vashti Bunyan began her career as a would-be pop singer in the mid-1960s. After a period studying visual art at Oxford University, she signed a management contract with Rolling Stones impresario Andrew Loog Oldham. Her first single, “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind”, a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards composition, was supposed to launch “Vashti” as the new Marianne Faithfull. Despite guitar work by Jimmy Page (then a young session musician) and Vashti’s effortless “it girl” image, the single failed to sell. An album’s worth of recordings went unreleased until 2007 when the compilation Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind – Singles and Demos, 1964 to 1967, recovered this lost phase in Bunyan’s career.
Abandoning the bustle of London, Bunyan and her partner Robert Lewis bought a horse and wagon to travel from London to Skye, the Scottish island where the singer Donovan planned to establish an artists’ commune. Donovan’s plan never materialized, but Bunyan and Lewis’s journey through miles of pastoral terrain inspired the songs (some of them co-written by Lewis) that would define Bunyan’s signature style.
Hearing the songs in nascent form, Joe Boyd – a producer whose Witchseason Productions launched the careers of Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, and other folk revivalists – enticed Vashti Bunyan back to London. Booked into Sound Techniques, the studio where Boyd produced Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Fairport’s Unhalfbricking the same year, Bunyan recorded Just Another Diamond Day in late 1969.
Released on Phillips in 1970, the record failed to garner much recognition beyond a small coterie of fans and critics. It was a situation much like that of Nick Drake, whose work went largely unheard until years after his death in 1974. Bunyan, however, had a different life to live. Frustrated with the lack of career progress, she retired from music to spend the next 35 years raising a family. Unbeknownst to her, Just Another Diamond Day gradually became a sought-after rarity among folk collectors.
Bunyan’s career hiatus lasted until 2000 when Spinney Records’ CD reissue of Just Another Diamond Day cast new light on the lost classic. Younger artists like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart (on whose album Rejoicing in the Heart Bunyan guested on vocals) sang her praises as a spiritual forerunner. Like Nick Drake, whose albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon had become celebrated classics by that time, Vashti Bunyan became a rediscovered music legend. She began writing songs again, demoing the material that would become Lookaftering with a crystalline voice remarkably untouched by time.
The opening track of Lookaftering, “Lately”, is an invocation to nature to keep the singer’s loved ones “safe from harm”. It epitomizes subtle foreboding underlying the gentleness of the music. This mood is reiterated later in “Wayward”, whose gentleness is belied by fears of “life getting lost in a world without end”. An allusion to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” (“Good fences make good neighbors”) informs Bunyan’s poetic musing about “lives getting lost in mending gaps in their fencing”.
Other songs follow a similar mood of serene contemplation with darkly poetic overtones. Max Richter‘s production is economical and unobtrusive, sticking close to many of Bunyan’s home demos – apart from replacing the demos’ electronic keyboards with acoustic instruments. Richter’s hand is occasionally more pronounced, as in “Turning Backs”, a lush standout track featuring Richter’s classical-tinged piano. Further embellishments come courtesy of guest musicians, including Devendra Banhart (guitar), Joanna Newsom (harp), and former Nick Drake orchestrator Robert Kirby (French horn and trumpet).
Lookaftering is not the kind of music that forges new ground or signals bold new trends. Its lack of assertion is its strength, as Vashti Bunyan – aged 60 when the album was first released, now 80 – defies the rush and boom of the modern era. Twenty years later, the Expanded Edition of Lookaftering sustains the quiet force of an artist entirely in command of her craft. Nothing else sounds quite like it.